Sleazoid Express by the late Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford is an exhilaratingly fun read about the glory days of Times Square grindhouse cinemas.

Edited by Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Experimental Cinema is a very academic film book with some very engaging bits.

The Dream Life by J. Hoberman is an excellent survey of the cinematic and political scenes of the ’60s that has some segments about underground film.

Visionary Film by P. Adams Sitney is still a must-read history of underground film even though it basically says that history petered out in the early 70s.

Soft Skull Press has reissued an amazing new edition of Jack Sargeant’s history of the influential Cinema of Transgression movement of the ’80s.

Sheldon Renan’s An Introduction to the American Underground Film, written in the ’60s, is an invaluable encyclopedic reference to the classics.

Parker Tyler’s Underground Film: A Critical History displays no passion for its subject and is one long slam on most of the underground movement.

Movie Journal by Jonas Mekas is essential reading on what the underground film movement was like in NYC back in the ’60s by the man who invented it.

J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s classic Midnight Movie is still an important must-read for fans of cult and underground films.

Though not entirely comprehensive, Phil Hall’s Encyclopedia of Underground Movies is still loaded with great information and is a fun read.